Happy All Souls Day! The temptation of bad holiday foods is upon us, and our ancestors would be appalled. If you are anything like me, the easy availability of candy is bad news. Let me be the first to tell you to GET RID OF IT today instead of letting it sit around and tempt you into sugar addiction.

The problem with candy is that it is made out of sugar. Sugar has many names, but it has the same effects. It doesn't matter if it's called honey, agave syrup, corn syrup or rice syrup, it still makes us crave more. And that is BAD NEWS.

It works like this. Eating too much sugar (and even a little it usually too much) causes an imbalance in our insulin and leptin levels. That imbalance causes us to feel hungry when we don't need food. That false hunger feeling, which can be a very strong craving, causes us to eat more and worse foods than we normally would. Uncontrolled eating worsens the imbalance which then leads to weight gain, pre-diabetes and diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and all manner of bad news.

The GOOD NEWS is that this pattern of craving is easy to reverse. If you start your day by NOT eating sugar, you can stop the cravings for that day. If you keep your sugar and carb intake low day after day, the cravings will disappear completely. You will find that you aren't really a sugar addict after all.

Eggs and bacon are a great anti-craving breakfast, especially if you keep the portions of potatoes, breads and such small. Even oatmeal is a far better breakfast than a pastry, or even a bagel, sorry to say. The worst possible breakfast in the universe is Halloween candy, so get rid of it! Throw it in the trash. Cheap sugary candy is the devil and you do not want to give it to anyone that you care about.

One small note about chocolate. People have the idea that chocolate is actually good for you, and this is true, but it has to be a certain kind of chocolate, AND you can't eat very much of it. Hershey's bars are more sugar and rancid milk than they are chocolate, so they are NOT good for you. Very dark (strong) chocolate, eaten one square at a time (not a whole bar!), is the only kind of chocolate that you can claim is good for you. And that is not the kind of chocolate that people give out at Halloween.

I hope this has been enough to get you started in the right direction. Throw away the leftover candies, and brush your teeth. Let your kids binge on sugar all at once until they feel sick, then get rid of the rest and make them brush their teeth too. Return to eating whole foods (fruit and veggies) as soon as possible! This Halloween curse can be beaten!

Never mix alcohol and tylenol. Tylenol’s other names are acetaminophen and paracetamol. It’s a common ingredient in over-the-counter cold medications (Nyquil), allergy meds, and RX pain meds like Vicodin and Percocet. People can accidentally take too much because it’s in so many different products. Tylenol is the world’s leading cause of fulminant liver failure, meaning severe, acute, and potentially fatal liver failure. Mixing alcohol with tylenol is the kiss of an ugly death. When you have a hangover and are searching the cabinet for something to treat your headache, use aspirin or ibuprofen or naproxen. They're not quite so dangerous.

Hydrate. Most hangover symptoms are caused by dehydration. Alcohol is a potent diuretic. You might know this from the way that one beer makes you pee like you drank two. Instead of taking pills for a hangover, guzzle water. And if you know you’re going to imbibe, drink water before you even start.

Take lots of vitamin C. Especially after a binge, vitamin C helps neutralize the toxic breakdown products of alcohol metabolism, and it helps reverse fatty liver disease. How much is lots? Four to twelve grams a day, split up into lots of doses. At the high end of this dose range it will cause diarrhea, but if you really binged, you will already have diarrhea.

Be nice to your Gut. Drinking alcohol causes Leaky Gut. This is when food particles leak through your gut lining instead of getting processed through the cells like they should. Leaky gut compromises your immune system and is a common factor in autoimmune diseases. So eat a healthy diet with fruit and vegetables, and eat fermented foods like live yogurt, kefir, kraut or kimchi. And get help if your gut isn’t working right.

Know when to call 911. If a heavy drinker suddenly spits up blood, it’s time to call. Alcoholics can die when blood vessels in their esophagus burst, but they can live to see another day if you call early enough. If the kids have had red bull drinks (alcohol and caffeine together) and start acting delirious, it’s time to call. Caffeine prevents people from passing out so they’re more likely to reach a blood alcohol level that is really poisonous. Oh yeah, and definitely get help if someone turns yellow. Their eyes turn first.

Drink coffee. You think I’m joking. Coffee helps reduce liver damage caused by alcohol and by hepatitis. It’s a powerful effect. Coffee also helps prevent dementia for other reasons. So enjoy your cuppa joe! It will help you sustain your Great Satan lifestyle longer.

Sunbathe. Large expanses of skin in bright sunshine makes hundreds of thousands of IU’s of vitamin D in just 15 minutes, so get a natural dose any time you can. If you can never expose your white expanses, or if you live where the sun don’t shine, take a vitamin D supplement. It helps prevent cirrhosis.

Take a B Complex. Thiamine is vitamin B-1, and a deficiency of this vitamin causes the severe memory loss that affects alcoholics. You need all the other B’s too, so don’t take just one kind of B. Take a quality B-complex in doses as big and regular as your drinking, and you’ve headed off this deficiency at the pass.

Don’t be stupid. I know it’s hard not to be stupid when you’re drunk but plan ahead when you’re not drunk so that you have a ride, a coat, and a place to crash. Your body wastes heat after heavy drinking, so you can feel warm while you are descending into hypothermia. Take a little extra care if you’re feeling reckless or have a tendency to behave impulsively. Get help if you’re really headed down the drain: we need you.

We humans are part of the web of life in a way that is somewhat unpleasant to consider. We think of parasites as those things that grow on trees and use the tree's sap for fuel, like mistletoe. We know about the parasites that you can get in your gut from traveling. But we don't like to think about the millions of microbes that live in our guts, on our skin, in our noses, and unfortunately, inside every cell in our bodies. In fact, at least of quarter of us have Staphylococcus aureus living inside our noses. This is the microbe that is called MRSA when it has become resistant to the antibiotic methycillin.

Sometimes the things that live on and in us are actually useful. At that point it is no longer a parasitic relationship, it is more of a synbiosis or eubiosis. There are bugs (microbes) in our guts that help digest our food, and also that make vitamins that we need. Mitochondria are organelles inside our cells that were probably parasites at one time, but they were so useful that we came to depend on them. They make ATP, the cash of energy currency in the body. We know that mitochondria were most likely independent organisms because they have their own DNA.

Relatively recently in human history, a bold man drank a potion of Helicobacter pylori bacteria, and gave himself gastric ulcers. Before that we didn't know that particular bug had much to do with ulcer formation. But now we know. And most of us have at least a few of this bug in us. In fact, pretty much all of us have a few of lots of different kinds of bugs that could be dangerous if they overgrew.

We get some microbes from our parents, and gain new ones throughout life. Babies who are born the normal way, through their mother's vagina, get their mother's vaginal flora in their mouths and swallow it. That sets up the kind of biota that lives in their guts for life. Usually a child's gut biota is fairly stable by age 3. A lot of our gut biota depends on what we eat. A sugary diet sets up a whole different community than a vegetable and fiber-rich diet. You can guess at which one is better for you. A stable community in your gut is protective because it stops other kinds from getting established. People with very stable healthy populations of bugs in their guts can eat anything and never get sick from it.

Stomach acid is the other normal way that we prevent new or bad bugs from setting up house inside us. Infants don't have much acid, so they are especially susceptible to whatever they eat. Adults normally have such strong acid that not much survives the stomach and gets to the intestines. But if we block our stomach acid with anti-acids, we are at risk for getting the wrong kinds of bugs in our guts.

The fastest way to mess up your microbial communities is to take antibiotics. The more high powered the drugs, the more imbalanced your biota will be as a result. The more often you take antibiotics, the more the remaining community will be antibiotic resistant. The bug that really hits hard on people who've taken a lot of antibiotics is called Clostridium difficile. It is on the CDC's list of extremely dangerous antibiotic resistant bugs.

In naturopathic-speak we call your body the "terrain". It is the ground upon which things grow. The list of possible infections is endless, and the number of bugs on and in you this very moment is also endless. As long as we are strong and relaxed and young enough, we don't get sick. When we get run down and weak the microbes can get the better of us. Stress from life events raises our cortisol and decreases our immune response, and the microbial populations start booming. We feed them sugary junk, and don't exercise enough, and don't keep our bowel movements regular, and they start running the show. It is possible to end up sick from the same bugs that you've been carrying around for 40 years or more.

There's new research that shows that depression, anxiety, and obesity are linked to particular sets of gut bugs. Experiments in mice and humans have shown that taking the microbes from an anxious person's gut and putting them in a calm person will make change what we thought was their personality. And switching gut bugs in mice can make a fat mouse skinny and vice versa. The wrong gut bugs are linked to all kinds of diseases of the gut, from ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease to IBS. There's a lot more information coming down the pipe about this. Supplement companies are trying to figure out how to introduce the right microbes into people's guts to help them heal from various diseases and mental states.

There's not much you can do about the fact that you will be exposed to microbes. No amount of antibacterial soap will protect you. The thing that will is keeping yourself healthy and calm enough to mount a good immune response. That way you keep the populations down to reasonable levels, where they may even help you somehow. Oh, and garlic will help. Garlic turns out to be the very simplest way to keep your gut biota in line. If you can stand it, some raw garlic every day kills the baddies and keeps the goodies. If you can't stand it, you might need some more advanced help.

My patients often ask if I think medical marijuana might be helpful. We’ve had some widely ranging conversations about the risks and benefits of this drug. As a naturopathic physician I may not prescribe cannabis even though it is legal for medical use here in Oregon; it is not in the ND formulary. The fact that I cannot prescribe it does not prevent me from discussing it. The issue will not go away, regardless of the laws and the war on drugs. Cannabis is ubiquitous, even though it is federally illegal with varying levels of state permissiveness. Just last month Colorado and Washington were the first states in America to approve the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. Those who fear it as a gateway drug, and those who advocate its medical use or broader legalization, are all making noise about it. The politics often plays more loudly than the facts. Marijuana is the #1 drug brought our way by Mexican drug cartels, and Mexican weed is likely to contain pesticides and other toxins. Synthetic cannabinoids are being imported from Asia labelled as bath soaps and sold in convenience stores. The war on drugs highlights our incarceration problem and the ugly politics of race. Reasonable medical questions remain unanswered. Our own government propagated a lot of disinformation back in the 1930’s when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was created and cannabis was classified as a narcotic (against the advice of the American Medical Association). The original Greek meaning of “narcotic” was any psychoactive substance that induces sleep, but in more recent times it has come to mean opiates and any drug derived from them. Opiates are addictive and are carefully regulated by the DEA. Cannabis is pharmacologically a world apart from opiates, and is no longer thought of as a narcotic, but it is still plagued by the negative reputation engendered by federal prohibition and propaganda, and the War on Drugs. Cannabis was federally prohibited in 1933, the same year that the prohibition on alcohol was rescinded. In 2009 the AMA did a review of the scientific literature on cannabis and found a few legitimate clinical trials with a grand total of less than 300 study participants. The DEA has refused to grant permission to universities or pharmaceutical companies to research it. The drug is approved by 18 states for medical use, but we have very little scientific information on which to base clinical applications. Anecdotal information about the indications of various strains guide the choices of medical users. The federal ban is still in effect, and current federal enforcement efforts are focused on importers and distributors and not on small scale possession (like they were under Reagan). Employers are within their legal rights to require drug testing. Law enforcement budgets rely on asset forfeitures (police can seize any cash or items likely to be related to drug trade without proof of guilt) which is incentive for police forces to continue to pursue small scale dealers. Medical cannabis programs provide a front for a new domestic black market. That the issue is contentious is an understatement; it is explosive. And we still don’t know what it is good for.A future email newsletter will focus on known and theoretical risks and benefits of cannabis use. Sign up for the monthly missive here.

This link goes to a Ted Talk by Jon Ronson, journalist from London, speaking about the research he did for a book on psychopathy. He pegs the relevant issue which is the fact that all of us display some characteristics of various mental disorders, including psychopathy. All of us, you say? Yes, all of us. Madness is inherent in the human condition. We have the capacity for rationality, but we also all have moments of unconsciousness. We have moments in which we are not as kind as we could be. We have moments of every description, but these moments do not condemn us. We can still be decent people.

In the Bible, Matthew 7:5 reminds us that we are not perfect. "You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Before we accuse anyone else of madness, it is in our best interests to recognize that we are human too, with requisite portions of inexplicable wildness.